Parental digital monitoring of a child involves specific practices of modern parenting that are primarily defined by the existence of surveillance or influence on children's activities that are mediated by the use of electronic devices. These practices exhibit different levels of intrusion into a child's privacy and autonomy to protect the child from perceived danger. A child's custodial rights and rights to protection are antagonistically positioned to the child's participation rights because of the very nature of such practices. In this work, parental digital monitoring of children is conceptualized through the theoretic framework of the panopticon which is an established framework in scientific discourse of surveillance. Panopticon was also used to formulate the concept of parental internalization and subsequent normalization of surveillance. 79 Croatian online web articles were analyzed to get an insight into the construction of the justifiability of parental digital monitoring practices. The results obtained by the method of reflexive thematic analysis demonstrate that the Internet is presented as a source of danger; parental digital monitoring of children is, thus, perceived as a necessary and reasonable practice and a child's risky online behavior. There are contradictory attitudes about different subjects, such as the relationship between parental trust and a child's risky online behavior. A child's wellbeing is perceived to be the responsibility of parents who need to find a way to balance the child's protection and autonomy. The concluding part of the paper considers the implications of the research results on understanding the practices of parental digital monitoring.